Re: [Ksummit-discuss] More productive uses of enthusiastic new kernel developers (was: Re: [TOPIC] Encouraging more reviewers)

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

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On Fri, 2014-05-30 at 12:56 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Thinking about this some more, what if instead of, or in addition to,
> having newcomers work on cleanup patches, what if we encouraged some
> of them to help to manually backport patches to the stable kernels
> that don't apply automatically?

Hm, my concern with that is that reviewing a patch that's been ported by
a newbie is probably *more* work than just doing the backport oneself.

When a backport doesn't trivially apply, there's usually an "obvious"
answer you start from, either dropping a hunk that doesn't apply because
there's nowhere for it to go, or inserting the same lines even though
the context is different, etc.

And then you apply your knowledge of the code, and perhaps refer to the
git history of the changes between then and now, and you then make sure
it's *correct*.

A newcomer is going to be able to do the simple part of that, but rarely
will they have the experience to do the interesting part. And if they
try, that just ends up with you trying to do a three-way merge of old,
new and their version when you review it. Surely if you have the time
for that, you had the time to do the backport in the first place?

It's a nice idea, but in practice I suspect that backports like this
aren't the best use of newcomers' time.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse@intel.com                              Intel Corporation

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